Rockstar Warns Against Installing GTA V Play Disc On Xbox 360

The game comes on two discs: a mandatory "install" disc and a "play" disc, each of them contains around 8GB of data. Some Xbox 360 owners prefer to install both discs in order to enhance performance. However, Rockstar warns that this might degrade performance instead of enhancing it.

"An 8GB install is required. For optimal performance, we recommend not installing the play disc," tweeted Rockstar Support.

Digital Foundry experimented with the Xbox 360 version of the game and concluded that Rockstar's recommendation is solid.

"Now, there's absolutely nothing stopping you installing disc two - the 'play' disc - onto the hard drive too, using the Xbox 360's dashboard to do so. It takes up an additional 7.8GB of storage. However, doing so impacts the game's ability to stream texture data, resulting in regular pop-in of in-game objects and textures," he added.

"So what's the story here? Well, optimal streaming is achieved by making us of all the available bandwidth in the system. Why stream just from the hard drive when you can run in data simultaneously from both the disc and the HDD? Based on what we're seeing on the Xbox 360 version, perhaps running both DVD and HDD assets from just the one source slows down access times, impacting streaming performance. It's not game-breaking stuff, but it does take you out of the moment when it does manifest and for that reason we can't recommend installing the play disc."

According to Digital Foundry's experiments, it is still possible to install GTA V play disc on a USB flash drive and play the game smoothly.

Well, Fact Every game that has come out for both ps3 and 360 has always been better on 360 thats a fact I sold 2 Crapstations because of low framerate, example madden gta the list goes on and on sorry fan boys fact before fiction lol

Facts are worthless if you can't understand them. If you don't know why the PS3 had lower framerates and just say that means the 360 is better you sound as much like an idiot as a guy who says the 360 is better because corn is good.

I think the generation is general is approaching 8+ years, almost a decade. So he wasn't ditching on the Ps3.
True fanboys would've linked the articles of how bad GTA4 ran on the Ps3. This time it seems its slightly better in Ps3. Big ******* deal, things change. Same experience overall.